in which everything basically tastes like cumin

About

So, this is not a how-to. I might be aiming to make you feel better about yourself?

About the title — this is not a pun in which I suggest that I am intuitive about kitchen counters or that I am the Malcolm Gladwell of cookery, where I can overturn your traditional thinking about humane cooking in a 40,000-word essay and convince you that the best way to marinate a chicken is to throw champagne vinegar at it while it runs around outside, because allowing the chicken to acknowledge its place in the industrial food web gives it a sense of agency and acceptance during its passage into death, or some shit. “Counterintuitive” is defined as “contrary to intuition or to common-sense expectation (but often nevertheless true)” or “contrary to what one would intuitively expect.” More particularly, for me, it means a well-earned and utter lack of confidence in the kitchen and with food in general that has led to the kind of circular thinking, intense self-consciousness, face-sweating, and self-gaslighting that leads to, at best, bland deliveries of mildly nutritious food and, at worst, plates of hot garbage (PHoG).

“Plates of hot garbage” is the best descriptor for anything I’ve ever cooked, and it comes from elsewhere: the very reverend Jake Morrill, an inspiring minister and writer and former wearer of aluminum foil pants when he was in bands in Austin, TX. He was describing a heap of industrial Chinese food that he was eating with our mutual friend, my husband. Who suffers a lot, and who cooks at least half the stuff my family eats. You can guess which half tastes better.

This blog tackles some of the stuff I have made/served/composted/thrown out.